Consciousness, subjective facts and physicalism – 50 years since Nagel’s bat.

Abstract

The existence of subjective facts in the epistemic sense defined by Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is like to be a bat?”, might be taken to support an anti-physicalist conclusion. I argue that it does not. The combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism is not only consistent with such subjective facts but predicts their existence. The notion that conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems plays a key role in the argument. Global Neuronal Workspace theory is assessed in terms of its potential to answer David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness. A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.

Keywords

• consciousness
• self-understanding.consciousness
• subjective facts
• physicalism
• self-understanding